Phorm’s online targeting service is designed to make advertising more relevant by taking account of all the websites a person visits, rather than just the content of a single web page.

Webwise works by having equipment at internet servive providers such as BT that will capture, for each site you visit, the URL, any search terms entered in a search engine, and other data from the page, in order to categorise it.

When users sign up for the system their browsers are tagged with a cookie - a small program with a unique code number used to identify each user. This provides the data used to create a profile of the type of websites each user visits.

When people visit a page where the advertising is sourced from the Open Internet Exchange set up by Phorm, they will see adverts targeted to their profiles. For example, someone who has visited a lot of travel-themed websites would see adverts for holidays, hotels and flights.